Ni Una Más

Episode 10 - Another mass grave is discovered in 2012, suggesting a new wave of femicides. Oz investigates connections between the cartels and the international banking system, and Mónica returns to Juárez for a final conversation with Paula Flores about what happened after Sagrario disappeared.

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Episode Transcript

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dot CEO. Forgotten is a production of ihonk Media and
Unusual Productions. Before we start. This podcast contains accounts which
some listeners will find disturbing, but without them, the story
can't be fully understood. Please take care while listening. Previously

(01:51):
on Forgotten, our speculation was that when you don't want
a crime to be solved, it's because the resolution of
it is going to be extremely either embarrassing to somebody
in power, or it's going to come back to you.
The thing is, the people who did this, they have

(02:12):
power to remain free to not being investigated. So there's
money in power behind murders. I believe lots of publication
that the emblematic case of Sagradio has been solved with Sadio,
that the murderer was in jail already at all. I've
always said the opposite, that the authors of the crime

(02:33):
are still free galements. For almost thirty years, young women
have been murdered with brutality and impunity in Horrez. During
that time, FBI agents, forensics experts, and journalists have corroborated
multiple lines of investigation, but in the absence of a

(02:56):
functioning justice system, there can be no definitive answer. For
a podcast listener and certainly a podcast maker, this lack
of resolution is frustrating, but for the relatives of the victims,
it is a never ending trauma. It was in this
context that Paula Flores and several other families created a

(03:18):
protest group. It was called Voices without Echo. Grabbed our
attention because when girls disappear, when they ask for help
and no one hears them, which no one knows anything,
no one hears anything. I posted flyers with strong messages
we want our daughter's assassins and things like that if

(03:40):
girls disappeared. We also helped to put up missing posters.
We began to fight as a group with After Sir
Garrio went missing, Paula took matters into her own hands.
She led the initial search, and when Sir Garrio wasn't found,
she appealed to the state Attorney general for a real investigation. Finally,

(04:01):
she interviewed the prime suspect herself, but Paula was never
able to unmask the people she called the authors of
the crime, and the flies and posters began to feel
like a temporary response to an entrenched problem. So the group,
including Paula's daughter Yea, decided to call out the femicides

(04:21):
with a more durable symbol. Doing all that, on one occasion,
Gear thought why not have a protest, but a permanent
one is She thought of a black cross with a
pink background as a symbol for the girls. Pink background
representing the women, and the black cross for the morning
of their loss in Mars. In March nineteen ninety nine,

(04:43):
we painted the first cross. Those crosses are now unmissable,
painted on lampposts all over Huirez. They are themselves an
echo of the missing women that reverberates around the city,
and Paula told us there was one place in particular
she felt that it was important to paint one on
the city jail, which, as far as she's concerned, has

(05:06):
never housed the people responsible for Cigario's murder. I painted
that cross. I had to fight with a police officer
who wouldn't let me. He said no, that I couldn't
paint it there. Are you crazy? I said, yes, maybe
I am. It's clear that you haven't had a daughter
of yours murdered. That gives me the right to paint
this cross here because you haven't done anything. The crosses

(05:31):
in Juarez are a constant reminder that the authorities have
failed to stop and solve the femicides or hold the
killers to account. They hint at the corruption and complicity
that mark this story, even if they don't say it
out loud, and as a result, the crosses aren't popular
with the city's officials. When Pope Francis visited Juarez in

(05:54):
twenty sixteen, the government painted over several of the crosses
along his planned route, But the mothers do not permit
the symbols to be raised or their daughters to be forgotten.
Each year, Paula goes out to repaint faded crosses in
memory of Sagario. Personally, what I would do was on

(06:15):
April sixteenth, the date of her disappearance. I'd go and
retouch them, and I'd invite people to support us. For me,
it's to keep denouncing my daughter's case, the injustice she suffered.
I think that in some way it keeps her memory alive.

(06:36):
When I hear Power speaking, I can't help thinking about
the word metito. In Huirez. It's often used to explain
how the drug cartel gets people complicit in small ways
and then never lets them go. But it was increasingly
clear that these murders make unexpected people metito. The journalists

(06:56):
who can't put the story down, and especially the families
who never get closure, and the line between healthy remembrance
and more problematic compulsion to repeat can vanish in the sand.
So how does Sagaria's death affect the rest of the
Flores family and who ultimately is responsible for her murder?

(07:23):
I'm al and i'm this is forgotten. The women of
Baramo Laera known known ste Hala Felicia. We've had so

(08:06):
many theories moniquer about who's killing the women in Juarez,
from one or more serial killers to La Ligna Corps,
the cartel, even powerful industrialists, and yet none of these
people were ever prosecuted, and the crimes have been going
on for thirty years. How does this all fit together

(08:29):
for you? As we've been going along in this series,
we've presented these possibilities individually. We have experts and investigators
attesting to the involvement of serial killers, drug cartels, empresarios.
But it's important to note that the Howadis femicides also
include victims of domestic violence. Their killers were likely intimate

(08:54):
partners who covered up their own crime by making it
look like another serial sexual murder. Other women were themselves
involved in the drug trade or had a connection to
someone who was. That said, you've also told me that
the situation hasn't been stable or constant for thirty years,

(09:15):
and even if the murders have the same fundamental drivers,
they're most likely committed by different people over time. How
do you explain how the femicides indhuires have changed since
the nineties. The trajectory of femicide in Waddis is that
it's come in waves over the last thirty years. Beginning

(09:38):
in the early nineteen nineties, was one strong wave. In
the early two thousands came a second strong wave, the
apex of which was the cotton Field murders, and then
in the later two thousands. Beginning in two thousand and eight,
you see a third wave of femicide come on. And
so by then, Diana, I had stopped going to Juarez,

(10:01):
and Alfredo Corcado was mostly in Mexico City, and I
was just beginning to test my wings as a radio
reporter as this drug war was raging. In these waves,
the first one in the early nineties that culminated with
those mass graves being discovered in nineteen ninety five and

(10:23):
nineteen ninety six, the second being in the early two thousands,
which is when Lily Alle hundred disappeared, and which culminated
in the discovery of the mass grave at the Cotton Field.
Tell me about this third wave and your reporting on it.
I'll never forget the moment when I got the first
tip that something was happening to women in Houais yet again.

(10:50):
It was December two thousand and eight. I was at
a protest of doctors in Huadis, near the university, and
as I was turning to leave, some college students walked
up to me and handed me a missing person's flyer,
and on that flyer was the black and white photo

(11:11):
of a young woman. She had dark, curly hair, and
a soft smile. I asked when she went missing? It
had been just twelve days. I just remember this sinking
feeling in my gut, thinking, oh no, not again. And

(11:36):
from that moment on, more women continued to go missing
in just a short amount of time. Many were last
seen in downtown waters. In other words, the same pattern
we've seen before. So that's when I stepped in and
started reporting, and once again these disappearances culminated in a

(12:02):
mass grave being discovered. What happened that fast forward to
late twenty eleven. A rancher is on his horse going
to check on his land out in the rugged mountainous
desert on the outskirts of Juarez, and they're riding along
and all of a sudden, the horse stops and kind

(12:23):
of seems spooked, and the rancher looks down and sees
some bone fragments. He gets off his horse, takes a
closer look, and realizes he's found a clandestine graveyard. He
gets back to his ranch, calls the police, and it
turns out that this was a graveyard of women's bones.

(12:46):
Eleven and all. Many of these women were women whose
missing flyers were posted all over downtown, some whose mothers
I interviewed, including the mother of a seventeen year old
girl named up I had gone to interview her mom,
Susanna months just sixteen days after Lupitita went missing. Susanna

(13:14):
showed me her daughter's room. All her things were there,
her backpack, her clothes. Lupita was last seen downtown, and
Susanna had been going there almost daily, asking around posting
missing flyers, and people downtown told her something very disturbing.

(13:38):
Susanna said, They told me she's probably being sold, that
there's an organized group downtown that's taking them. It's not
just my daughter, Susanna told me, it's more. More girls
are missing. A friend who worked at a fabric store
downtown reported seeing Lupitha cradling a pair of new tennis

(14:00):
shoes in her arms. He said he last saw Lupeta
rushing down Mint like so many other young women before.
Lupeta was last seen on Mina Street. That's the central
bust interchange in Huirez, which has all kinds of brothels

(14:21):
and nightclubs nearby. After our own trip to downtown, Sandra Rodriguez,
the Huires journalist at Aldiario, warned us never to go back.
That's where a lot of the girls were seen for
the last time. We were right there. Ye ye, there's
a very very very dangerous place of the city. Yeah. Oh,

(14:45):
that's had certainly a song where they have lookout. Absolutely
whose day plus us take us the gangs. That's how
they controlled the area through into mileage. Sundra also reported
on the third wave of femicides, and she explained that
Los Aztecas is across border criminal enterprise that began life

(15:09):
as an Elpasso prison gang. They now work with the
cartel to traffic drugs and control various other illegal businesses
in downtown Quirez. What do you think the Aztecas lookouts
or thinking when they're looking at us, but you might
be investigating them. I think that's their concern, certainly. I

(15:30):
think that they were protecting their women exploitation business because
you couldn't go through Downtarrea without being chasten or follow business.
This was the key word in a new line of investigation,
and according to Sundra's reporting, many of the victims in

(15:51):
the third wave of femicides were trafficked for profit. When
we were last in downtown Quirez, we saw missing posters
with the faces of young women who disappeared within the
last few weeks, and that raised the haunting question, was
it possible those women were still alive and perhaps even

(16:12):
in the area we're walking around downtown. What as you
know where they went missing. There's so many people, and
you think they're here somewhere. Why can't why can't we
find them? I sometimes wished I was a man and
I could go into the brothels and just look for
the women. I have tried. I have tell me. I

(16:34):
tried to get into with a friend. They were two
guys in the front door. No, you cannot get into.
Why you cannot? Just like that? They were two guys.
I didn't see if they were armed, but I thought,
what kind of things do you have? Insight that you
have two guys protecting your dark so they have the carls.

(16:59):
Sandre couldn't get in to that brothel, But there was
another location where women were allegedly being held after being abducted.
It was called Hotel Verde, and it was essentially a
safe house for Los Aztecas, a place where they store weapons,
sold drugs, and traffic women. It was located near the
downtown and not far from the border with El Paso,

(17:22):
Sandra interviewed a young woman whose mother sold food to
the clients at the hotel. The girl that he was
interviewing told me, my mother found out that they were
just teenagers being exploited, and I said, we didn't your
mother do something? I mean call the police, to whom
there was a lot of militaries, the troops, further police,

(17:45):
municipal police, they were all consuming the girls. There There
is no place to go and announce this, you know.
It was heartbreaking for me to know that these girls
when they were alive, were seen by are a lot
of people in downtown horns while the mothers were trying

(18:05):
to look to find them. And I've already connect this too.
I mean, where are you going to go to announce this?
They are there. They know if the people who are
supposed to be protecting you are actually involved in the
exploitation of the women. According to this mother who was
bringing food in, yes, yeah, where do you turn for help?

(18:30):
I think that was the most chocking part. According to Sandra,
Despite the fate of women like Lupita being an open secret,
the authorities failed to solve the crimes. There was a
trial in twenty fifteen and there were convictions, but at
best the jailed men was seen as low level operatives
of Los Astecas, and at worst as yet more scapegoats.

(18:54):
Once again, the authorities were accused of not just being incompetent,
but of being complicit. And in an environment while getting
away with murderer is so easy, femicide has become normalized.
Sandra told us that these days, another missing woman in
Houarez doesn't even make the front page of the city's newspaper.

(19:15):
It became like more part of my normal life or
everybody's life. But yeah, the killing skipon and the disappearance
is skip on, happening in the promised squares. This is
not the country where I grew And now we're just
to the bileness, really impunity and embarriscare of thinking how

(19:37):
fast you can go backwards in society. While on a
Nieman fellowship at Harvard, Sandra wrote a book called La
fabric The Crime Factory. In it, she traces a line
from the permanent poverty of the Maculadora workers to the

(19:59):
murders of women to the metastasis of organized crime in
the city. I was trying to explain, so to express
how killing was turning into a business. Yeah. And I
think that metaphor the crime factory, relates to the industrial

(20:20):
character of the city, but also the criminal industry and
trying to express that crime. It's obviously not just a
social issue, but also it is fueled by economic forces.
I think it's a city with a lot of suffering.
The people is completely exploited. The people doesn't make enough

(20:45):
to live even when they work the whole day. And
I think it's this phase of globalization that you can
see here. Immediately. The whole country depends on America, but
in the city you can see it, like in matter
of minutes, how we are connected, connected economically, but separated

(21:07):
by a border. Sandra remembers driving at night through the
Franklin Mountains in Texas and looking down into the valley
at Juarez and El Paso, so you can see exactly
where the line between the two countries was. Because the
Mexican side was so much more densely populated and thus
brightly illuminated, the lights appeared to sundra like wave breaking

(21:30):
against the wall. I was looking at the border from
very high you can see the line, the border, and
then a lot of flights. In my view it was
like the whole pressure of the whole rest of the
continent trying to reach American then again stopped right at

(21:55):
the border, which is Wires, and I thought, the city
can contain this much poverty or violence. I mean, all
Latin Americans is coming for some reason. That broke my heart,
like this city cannot hold this and it's going to explode.
No city in the world can hold a whole pressure.

(22:21):
This pressure turned into violence, This pressure turned into legal business,
This pressure turns into very bad conditions of living for
the people. I just felt that. I start to cry
and cry walking around Whoires, seeing the crosses and the

(22:49):
missing posters. The femicides can appear as a self contained tragedy,
but from a vantage point up on high it becomes
clear how the city is positioned in relation to the
US creates the conditions for its violence. When we come back,
we look at how US financial institutions have been washing

(23:10):
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(25:01):
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podcast to learn more. So, there was this third wave

(25:22):
of femicide Monica that involved human trafficking at Bte Verte
and other locations, and that's something that you and Sandra
both reported on. How does that relate to Alfredo Corcillo
and what he reported about La Ligne and the cartel parties.
The evolution of femicide, I guess you could say that

(25:43):
it began as a way to strengthen the bonds between
organized crime. Then it evolved to a kind of sick
form of celebration and sport, and then it became a
means of profit. It became a business, just like everything else,
the drugs and the manufacturing. This third wave of femicide

(26:09):
involved women being sexually brutalized over the course of weeks
or months multiple times. You know, they found if we
can keep them, we can make some money here. So
ultimately it sounds like although serial killers and even perhaps

(26:30):
wealthy industrialists took advantage of this atmosphere of impunity in Huarez,
where violence against women up to and including murder was permissible,
the heart of this is really organized crime. Organized crime
and drug trafficking is at the root of all of

(26:54):
Mexico's problems, and until that gets resolved, nothing is going
to get better. I don't care how many goodhearted American
judges and attorneys come down and do training sessions. The
ability to corrupt police and the judicial system is still there,
and until you can get rid of that, nothing is

(27:16):
going to get better. That problem is largely out of
Mexico's hands when the demand persists on the American side,
and the US has been more than willing to pour
billions of dollars into the law enforcement side trying to
stop the drugs from coming over, and now it's clear

(27:40):
to me, I mean, I mean that is an unwinnable fight.
You have to address demand. Demand for illegal drugs in
the US creates the revenue on which Laalna, Los Astecas,
the Sinaloa Cartel, and the rest of Mexico's organized criminal
enterprises depend. Understand more about the financial underpinnings of all

(28:02):
this violence, we called Ed Bulliami. He's a British journalist
who made his name covering the war in Bosnia in
the nineteen nineties, as well as the First and Second
Gulf Wars, and he's also reported extensively from Juarez. He
wrote a book called A Mexica War along the Borderline,
and while working on it, he spent time with the

(28:24):
likes of Dina Washington Valdez, Sandra Rodriguez, and Paula Flores.
I realized, actually that I first interviewed Paula Flores twenty
years ago, so it's two decades now reporting this atrocity.
You impunity is a hallmark of those twenty years. In
the course of his reporting, Ed came to view young

(28:47):
women like Sagrio as the casualties of a type of
conflict that he never encountered elsewhere. I think what interested me,
in what has appalled me and confused me, is that
were Iraq and Bosnia were wars. I mean you and
shells landing, cowering in cellars, columns of refugees through the

(29:09):
dust of the stone. These are wars. And yet if
we take the sort of that experience into Mexico, what
have we got. We've got a death toll since two
thousand and six in Mexico which is three times that
of Bosnia, one hundred thousand in Bosnia, three hundred thousand
in Mexico. We've got, perhaps most appallingly of all, in

(29:32):
its different way, a number of disappeared, vanished people leaving
families who have no body to bury in the limbo
of disappearance. And yet we've got this situation in a
country that is irresistibly wonderful, where the football league functions
very well and is great to watch, where the markets

(29:53):
are open and vibrant. It's a new kind of war
in what is supposed to be time. Things look normal,
but they're not. It's a completely brutalized society. It has
the darkest shadows in many ways of one's whole career
as a war correspondent, According to Ed, the root cause

(30:15):
of this new kind of war is drug trafficking and
the cartels who've profited from it. I mean there is
no ring around narco violence now, I mean narco violence
becomes domestic violence, becomes extortion, becomes trafficking, becomes sex, trafficking
becomes migrant smuggling. You know, there will come a time,
I think when actually drugs is probably a minority interest

(30:38):
of these cartels because the expansion of their business is
so big within Mexico business. There's that word again. Sandra
used it to describe the exploitation of women in the
third wave of femicides, but it's also the key to
understanding why the war in Mexico is so amorphets. The

(31:00):
conflict is not about political identity or national boundaries. It's
about profits. And to understand the cartels, you have to
think of them as commercial enterprises for whom violence is
a tool of domination. Cartels are corporations. They're not opponents
of our financial and economic capitalist system. They're not even

(31:24):
pastigious of it, are actually innovators of it. Pablo Escobar,
he was doing Pan American duty free trade long before
laughter or Bill Clinton had the idea and cocaine. You
can flood the market without a drop in price. You
can solve the good stuff to bankers, politicians, lawyers and journalists,
and the ship in the ghetto to be cooked as crack.

(31:44):
I mean, it's a perfect commodity. The one problem with
cocaine the sums generated are too big to be laundered
through small businesses or stored in stash houses, and that
requires innovation. The profits are so vast, hundreds of billions
of dollars. Now, you can't go around Mexico spending that
out of a back of a truck. No, you have

(32:05):
to bank it. You have to find a banker, and
a bank and a lawyer who's prepared to get that
money into the system. To get their profits into the
legitimate economy, the cartel needed help from establishment partners. Ed
became obsessed by uncovering who they were, and in two

(32:27):
eleven he broke a story under the headline how a
big US bank launched billions from Mexico's murderous drug gangs.
The bank was wor Covier, and once again the story
began with somebody who wanted justice. I got a whistleblower
from inside the banker, a man, a brave man called

(32:48):
Martin Woods to tell me the whole story over seven
long sessions and published it up until two thousand and eight.
Why Covier was one of the biggest banks in the US,
but in the aftermath of the financial crisis, it was
sold to Wells Fargo, which is now the world's fourth
largest bank. Martin Woods worked at WA Covier and his

(33:12):
job was to spot money laundering. So when Woods noticed
a series of dubious transactions at currency exchanges in Mexico,
he started issuing suspicious activity reports to try and stop them,
but then a manager quietly advised him to quote develop
a better understanding of Mexico. Undeterred, Woods continued to flag

(33:34):
more suspicious transactions coming out of Mexico, but instead of
heeding his warnings, the bank decided to discipline him. Wacovia
claimed that Woods had exposed them to quote potential regulatory
jeopardy and quote large fines. Wacovia had been moving an
inefftable amount of money that actually belonged directly and was

(33:57):
provably flowing from the Sonulo a cartel, the mind boggling
sum of three hundred and seventy two billion dollars. I mean,
that's the GDP of a nation in some parts of
the world. Criminal proceedings in the US were eventually brought
against Weakvia for failing to quote maintain an effective anti
money laundering program. The federal prosecutor argued that quote were

(34:21):
Covia's blatant disregard for our banking laws gave international cocaine
cartels a virtual carte blanche to finance their operations. In
other words, Wakovia was more interested in its own profits
than preventing organized crime from entering the banking system. They
ultimately settled out of court for one hundred and sixty

(34:41):
million dollars, a tiny fraction of the launded sums. The
amount was paid by the new parent bank, Wells Fargo,
who had recently been bailed out by US taxpayers. Now,
the reason we can talk about this without fear of
the Wells Fargo legal department is because Wavia got court,
admitted it, and settled out of court. Too big to fail,

(35:06):
too big to jail for sure. Edge reports that as
were Covier was being investigated, another bank, HSBC stepped in
and filled the void to launder money for the Sina
lower cartel with HSBC. It's even more extraordinary because the
narcos were actually going to branches of HSBC in Mexico
with boxes specially made to fit through the teller's windows,

(35:28):
filled with hundreds of dollars in cash, be given a
receipt for the amount, without the teller actually opening the
box to look what was inside. And yet we didn't
know anything about this. The Financial Times covered the settlement
out of court with the following line, Mexico was becoming
a compliance nightmare for HSBC full stop. Ye oh, all

(35:50):
these little dark people abusing our good bank. Once again.
No one goes to jail, no one's even prosecuted or charged.
A few apologies, wrap on the knuckle again. Not all
of the media was as forgiving. The New York Times
described HSBC as quote too big to indict and reported
that the Justice Department decided against prosecution because they were

(36:12):
worried about quote, destabilizing the global financial system. I've tried
to make it my business to report to the best
of my ability on the impunity in our system whereby
the blood money the fat cats, who basically face absolutely
no sanction whatsoever for taking these vast profits and swilling

(36:35):
them around the so called legal economy. Whoever paid Psycho
Flores Killer to do what they did to her is
missing an action so far as the justice system is concerned,
as is HSBC. But there is a line, there is
a direct line from that's atrocity right up to the

(36:57):
boardrooms of Wall Street. In the game of joining the dots,
there's only two dots to join. The drug cartels exist
to make money, and they spend that money corrupting officials
and creating a reign of terror in Mexico, largely in
order to make more money, including from trafficking young women.

(37:18):
And according to ed, one of the ways to prevent
this from happening would be to aggressively prosecute international money laundering.
I'm pretty sure that peace is better than war, and
I'm pretty sure that you could actually do something to
abate this appalling new kind of war if you simply
throttle the money, if you actually just made it not

(37:38):
lucrative or impossible to bank this money. And as my whistlebler,
Martin Wood said from my Covia, if you don't get that,
you're missing the story. The United States Justice Department effectively
chose to ignore that part of the story because they
were worried it could trigger another financial crisis. Meanwhile, Martin Woods,

(38:01):
the whistleblower, says that it was impossible for him to
get a job at another bank after exposing the money
laundry activity at WA Covia. And it is these figures
who speak out in pursuit of justice who motivate its work.
War journalism is it's quite a weird profession. Some people
report conflict because deep down they quite like it, because

(38:23):
it gives them a bit of a bit of a buzz.
I'm the opposite to that. I get terrified. I have PTSD.
I hate it. I have a sort of shortcoming whereby
when I'm reporting something, I try to think myself into it.
I can't just write down an account of what was
done to Parla Floris's daughter without trying to imagine what

(38:43):
it must have been like to be her in that
room with those people, you know, who have eyes, who
had faces, who she could see, presumably the blades they
were about to apply and applied a body. I mean,
it's not a very psychology benefitsing to do, but I
think it's professionally necessary. But what you get is the

(39:05):
addiction to the people who were against it, because it's
a humbling thing. Being with the soldiers in Bosnia, the
gorillas who were trying to oppose the genocide was itself
uplifting and humbling. Being with the mothers of the women
to whom this was done leaves you oddly enriched in

(39:26):
a way. I mean, it's the last line of Samuel
Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, A sadder and a wiser man, he
woke the morrow morn. That is what one should aim
to be as a combat journalist, sadder and wiser. And
your job is to make other people sadder, and the whistleblowers,

(39:48):
the truth seekers, the mothers. Painting across or defending a
scapegooded bus driver, or even calling out non compliance with
money laundering regulation. Any of these actions can cost you
anything from your livelihood to your life, and none of
them is sufficient to produce the kind of systemic change

(40:09):
required to stop femicide. But that doesn't diminish the importance
of bearing witness, of making the invisible visible, from the
pocket of your genes to the bank card in that pocket.
As the FBI agent Frank Evans put it best, you
can kill me, but you can't eat me. When we

(40:32):
come back, Monica returns to Juarez for a final conversation
with powder Flores about Sir Gario's legacy and the price
of activism. During the month of April, shout the buy one,
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I'm doctor John White, WebMD's chief medical officer and host
of the spotlight on series from our Health Discovered podcast.
In this special episode, we'll hear about living a fulfilling

(42:00):
with chronic cart failure, a condition that doesn't have to
be as scary as it sounds. I was outside shoveling
snow and I noticed I was coughing up flim unbeknownst
to me, I left a trail of blood behind me,
and I was one sign. Now. Of course, prior to
I was excessively gaining weight, I had issues breathing, sleep APNA,

(42:22):
I had a lot of those classic signs. My legs
were beginning to retain fluid, and I was having heart
palt patients. My heart would be really excessively fast and so.
But ultimately it was when that occurred that I thought
something was seriously wrong. Listen to Health Discovered on the
iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Before we

(42:59):
concluded this series, I knew I had to have one
last conversation with Paula. I wanted her to tell me
about what happened to her husband, Jessus. Femicide is largely
viewed as the realm of women. It's something that happens
to women that hurts women, and those fighting against femicide

(43:20):
are primarily women. We focus on the pain of the mothers,
but rarely do we talk about fathers. So despite escalating
drug violence, a record heat wave, and a raging pandemic,
I traveled to Hawadis again. But before we began, I

(43:42):
asked Paula she was ready to have the conversation. I
knew it wouldn't be an easy one, Okay. I started
by asking Paula to tell me how she met her husband. Well,
I was eighteen. Him in a farming village near the
little town where I lived. My sister took me. She

(44:05):
asked me to go with her to a dance. We
went walking. It was two hours on foot, so that's
when I met him. From Elsto to his village. We
walked together talking and he told me that he wanted
me to dance with him at the dance. In fact,
that night I only danced with him if so. From

(44:27):
there he started to fall in love and we only
saw each other for a short time. I knew him
for less than a month. When I married him, Paula
was just eighteen and je Sus was twenty five. He
visited her at home twice, and on the third visit
he proposed. Paula accepted, packed a few things, and left

(44:51):
with him that same day. It was sudden, but Paula
was living with an abusive stepfather and saw it as
a potential escape. I think these things are predestined, you know.
For my stepfather, he was very harsh with us. He
wouldn't let me go out. He would hit me a lot.

(45:12):
Jus also came from an abusive household, and together he
and Paula formed the kind of loving family they'd yearned for. Juie,
their only son, was their firstborn. Then they had six daughters,
guille Juana, Sagrario, Lupe, Claudia, and Alicia. From the moment

(45:34):
I met I felt protected. He would take care of me.
He was always worrying about me, even in the street.
He wouldn't let me walk on the traffic side of
the sidewalk. He was a really responsible man, an exemplary father.
From my children, he never hit them to this day.
Now that they're all grown, they still have fond memories

(45:56):
of him. In their home state of Durango, Jesus worked
as a lumberjack, disappearing for days at a time to
the nearby mountains. Baala would send him off with a
batch of homemade Dorotheas the family was poor, Guille, the
oldest sister, recalls erasing her notebooks at the end of

(46:16):
a school year so she could reuse them the following year.
In what Is, Jesus saw an opportunity to make a
better life for his family. He went to work at
the factory alongside his children, and then two years after
their arrival, Sagrario disappeared. When well, when our daughter went missing,

(46:37):
he went looking for her along with the rest of
the family. From the very first night, I think as
the head of the family, as the father of our daughters,
he showed that he was going to find her. He
would say, I promise you that we're going to find
our daughter. But Jesus could not keep his promise. Instead,

(46:59):
fourteen days later, he walked into the hoattiest morgue to
claim what authorities said was his daughter's lifeless body. As
soon as the family search for Sagario ended, their search
for justice began, this time with Paola in the lead.
His who stuck with her, following alongside when she broke

(47:20):
into the Attorney General's meeting. He marched with her in protests,
combed the desert looking for remains, and painted crosses on
lamp posts. I would say to him, let's go, dear,
and he would never say no. He would always say
let's go. Even though I was the one who always talked,
he would never speak up. One day he told me,

(47:42):
he said, I don't talk. I don't say anything, because
it's enough to hear you speak. He said, very shaky,
I feel bad. I can't talk. Although mostly silent, his
Who's was one of the few fathers at the front lines,
most have to continue working to support their families during

(48:05):
the fight for justice. For Sagrario J who started getting
harassed in his own neighborhood. He was even beaten by
a couple strangers on his way back home from a
Hamburger stand. Came back to the truck. There were three
men waiting for him. They were dressed normally in jeans
and T shirts. He told me they started asking me

(48:25):
for money. He told them I don't have anything, so
they beat him up pretty badly. He turns out they
didn't rob him of anything, not his watch, not the
little money he had, nothing. The only thing he lost
was an address book, a small one he fit in
his pocket, and there he had our home telephone number.
He had telephone numbers of other activists. After that, I

(48:52):
started getting calls at night to our home phone. The
men started making those calls to say they needed sex services.
The activism, the harassment, the grief, it all took its
toll on the entire family. His sus began drinking more

(49:13):
than usual, and neighbors warned Paula that he was having
an affair. His sus had told Paula that a woman
a neighbor had been provoking him. He'd always complained to me.
He would curse, I've fucking had it with her. Wherever
I go, she finds me. Paula says this went on

(49:37):
for years. His whus swore on his children that he
remained loyal to Paula. One day, I asked him to
take me shopping downtown. He said, sure, let me just
go visit with a tailor first. So he got in
the shower and in the meanwhile, I ironed his clothes.
When he got out of the shower, he came to

(49:57):
me and held me. He told me he loved me
very much, and he told me he wanted to take
my breath with him. My mouth hurt. He kissed me
so much and he kept telling me, I want to
take your breath with me. I didn't understand what he meant.
After that, he said goodbye. He stood at the door

(50:20):
and turned toward me, and I told him, my eyes
that watch you leave, when will they see you return?
I don't know why. I said that, yes, and then
he left. Baula got into the shower herself and got
ready to go out. Then at two o'clock the phone rang.

(50:43):
It was his sous and I thought it was strange
because he was supposed to be on his way back
home right. So I answered the phone and asked what's
up and he said, no, honey, I just want to
ask you to ask God that you forgive me. Forgive me.
He said, I love you so much, so much, and

(51:04):
then he said it's better this way, and I said,
but where are you? And he said it's better this way.
That's it. He said, I love you and then hung up,
and he told me the truck is parked in front
of the tailor's shop. It was drizzling to us when

(51:29):
it rains. It was very sad because it was raining
when Sagadio disappeared. So we went to the truck and
I told my son Chewy, look see what he's left us.
And yes, he left us a letter in the glove compartment,
these words, I ask your forgiveness and did you farewell?

(51:51):
Carry you all in my heart, Paula, I take your
breath with me. Have faith that you will persevere. Look
will do it for our family. That's my final wish.
Don't deny me of it. If God doesn't forgive my
bad actions, I hope you will. I can't continue writing.

(52:12):
I'm shaking all over. It is. I left you money
in the piggy bank. Muse it for God's sake, to
finish your home. That's what it's for. Goodbye, my love.
The newspaper reported a man and a woman had been
discovered shot to death in a cardboard shack in Lomaszpoleo.

(52:37):
They were both lying on a twin mattress, a pistol
resting between them. The man was his sous the woman
was the neighbor with whom he was supposedly having an affair.
Police ruled the incident a murder suicide. Yeah. The only

(52:59):
thing I want it was not to live anymore. I
would think of my daughters, that they were grown, that
they didn't need me anymore, that I had done my part.
And besides, he and I made a pact that whoever
died first would come for the other one, and I
would admonish him. You didn't keep your promise. Because I'm
still here. I wanted to kill myself. I would grab

(53:26):
the car and sometimes I would drive in a zigzag.
I would get on the busiest streets of what is
is were five lane streets, and I would say to him,
you are my pilot. I was your pilot many times.
I was always at your side. Well, now you're my pilot.
You will determine how all this will end. The sudden

(53:48):
loss of her husband, her constant companion, broke Baula, As
with her daughter Sagrario, She was never fully satisfied with
the police investigation into Jesus's death. Still, Paula told me
she felt muzzled by the possibility that Jesus had committed
a femicide. How could she continue to show her face

(54:12):
in meetings and marches to protest that very crime. It
felt like the ultimate hypocrisy. Later, Paula remembered something Jesus
had told her not long before his death. He would
tell me that I was a badass woman, and that's
how he would say it. He would always tell me,

(54:33):
you're a badass woman. You can handle it. The day
I'm no longer here, you can do it again. In
the letter, he told me the same thing, and I
could do it. I could keep going. I've always continued
to give interviews, offering my testimonials because I want to

(54:53):
keep denouncing what happened to my daughter. I'll say too,
that when we're no longer here, she'll live on and
say a documentary, a book, and that's where the memory
of Sagadio will remain. I want to keep denouncing that
her case is not yet resolved, that girls continue to disappear.

(55:14):
I want to keep going. But it's true that it
takes its toll. There's something so heartbreaking about his US's story, Monica,
the way he stands by Pawla and supports her in
her acts of bearing witness, but can't take it himself.

(55:35):
And in the end seems to be involved in the
murder of yet another woman in Houarez. I know you
hesitate to even bring this story up with Pawla, but
why did you feel it was important? His Susie story
is an extreme version of what happens to the fathers
of femicide victims. Many succumbed to quick and sudden depths,

(55:58):
whether it be from illness or cancer or a heart attack.
In the case of his sous by his own hand.
The newspaper report says he had a gunshot wound through
his chest, but I read a gunshot wound through his heart,
almost as if he was shooting himself in the heart

(56:18):
because he couldn't take the pain that he carried there.
He wanted to feel like the strong one, you know,
the man of the family with whom we felt safe,
so he kept all his feelings trapped inside. We never
talked about it because for all of us, the main
focus was to keep demanding justice for Saradio, and the

(56:41):
rest was pushed aside. We didn't even sit down to
eat as a family anymore. Yeah, life is passing me by.
We're all getting sick, our children too, and where is
the justice? That's when they say to me, well, what
have you gained from all this, Mom, It's nothing. We've lost.

(57:03):
We've lost our dad. Yet I never quit. I wish
some day to get out of here, for all of
us to leave and never hear about any of it again.
And I wish there would be a day just for me,
a day without sumicides. It's heartbreaking to see how Paula's

(57:29):
strength drives her on and on, and at the same time,
how the act of protests itself can create more trauma
for the family. But her strength is remarkable, and I'm
wondering how you make sense of it all. I guess
it's your typical David and Goliath story, only in this
this case. Yeah, David has not slayed the giant. The

(57:52):
giant lumbers on, and Paula is simply trying to get
by day by day, and she's got her daughters. I'm
the one thing that I do take heart from is
after Paula and I did the interview, I sat and
I visited with her for just a little bit longer.
She opened the door to her bedroom and the minute
she does that, people start flowing in, including her two

(58:14):
daughters and a grandson, and they all ended up on
her king size bed in her bedroom, like the grandson
is on his phone, and like Kuana and Guille they're
lying there and chatting and laughing. And Paula comes in,
What do you all want for lunch? What are we
what are we gonna make for lunch? And there's a
softness there. Not everyone has a family that they get

(58:38):
along with that they feel so at home and cozy
with that they can just walk into their mother's bedroom
and sprawl on her bed, almost as if they were
little children. I'm certain they all draw strength from each other.
But I hope it's the last interview I do with

(58:58):
Paula about the trays in her life. I don't hope
it's the last time I see her or the last
time I talk to her, but I do hope it's
the last time I ask her to recount the tragedies
and trauma in her life. She's done that enough and
I think I think she needs a rest. And what

(59:20):
about you, Monica, Well, when you first start out as
a journalist and you're young and fresh and optimistic that
if you just tell the story, something will change, and
then you get to the point where where I am,
where you report the same thing over and over. Not
only does it keep happening, it gets worse and there
is not much change, and then you wonder, what what

(59:43):
is it for. I'm just going to leave it all behind.
I'm just going to walk away, like I said at
the beginning of this podcast. But then you realize, no, no,
you just always have to fight. It doesn't mean that
you're going to win, but if you don't fight, then
all is lost. When you make a little progress, there's
going to be pushback, and you just have to keep going.

(01:00:06):
And maybe you do need to step away for a
spell to collect yourself and eel and gather strength again.
And once you do, then you get back out there.
I was thinking about that word again, Metito. Once this

(01:00:29):
story touches you, it never lets you go. Last night
I dreamt that I was stuck in Juarez, being watched, hunted,
But of course I woke up in the safety of
my bed. Paula and generations of her family will never
wake up from the nightmare of Sagarrio's murder, but I'll

(01:00:50):
keep going. The story of the Flores family is just
one of hundreds like them Inhuarez, and today Wires itself
is just one city and many where institutions have collapsed
in the face of money and power, and violence against
the most vulnerable prevails. But there is sadness and wisdom
to be cleaned from all of this. Wisdom, at the

(01:01:14):
very least, to recognize one another's humanity. I'm as Voloshin
and I'm mon thanks for listening. You're no see You're

(01:01:43):
not I La Felicia Forgotten The Women of Juarez is

(01:02:22):
co hosted by Me Monica and me oswald Oshin. Forgotten
is executive produced by Me and Mangesh Hattikila. Our producers
are Julian Weller and Katrina Norvelle. Sound editing by Julian Weller,
Jacopo Penzo, Aaron Kaufman, and Michelle Lands. Lucas Riley is

(01:02:43):
our story editor. Caitlin Thompson is our consulting producer. Production
support from Emily Maronoff and Aaron Kaufman. Recording assistance this
episode from Phil Bodger. Music by Leonardo Hablum and Hakabo Libermann.
Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Carla Tassara is the voice

(01:03:04):
actor for Paula Flores Special Thanks to Ryan Matts and
to Cynthia Begrano. And Maria Socorro Tabuenca for their support
to this series. Thanks also to the producers of the
documentary La Carta. This podcast is dedicated to all the
women lost to senseless violence in Hoatis and all around

(01:03:26):
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